The problem with food expiration dates.

SGGP 22/05/2023 10:57

Without a common standard for food expiration dates, much good food is thrown away due to misunderstandings about expiration dates... All of this leads to waste and increases environmental pollution. The United Nations estimates that global food loss and waste account for 8%-10% of total greenhouse gas pollution.

Discarding expired food has many negative consequences.

Smart consumption

According to the Washington Post, Dana Gunders, executive director of the non-profit anti-food waste organization ReFED, said: “There is a lot of confusion among both consumers and those working in the food industry about expiration dates.” This confusion not only misleads shoppers, but also means a lot of perfectly good food is going to waste.

Some members of the U.S. Congress are trying to change the law to help reduce emissions from food waste. They recently reintroduced a bill that was first introduced in Congress in 2021, called the Food Expiration Date Act. This bill would standardize date labels on food, eliminating the need for expiration dates on many foods and instead providing instructions on safe food storage.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture , most expiration dates consumers see on food products are for freshness assurance, not safety. An expired product may not taste as good as a freshly sold item, but it is still perfectly healthy to eat.

Currently, with the exception of infant formula which requires expiration dates, the US lacks a national standard for food expiration dates that many other countries have.

According to experts, the lack of federal law has led to a series of conflicting laws between states, with manufacturers, in many cases, putting any dates and phrases they want on their products. From now on, we should start abandoning the habit of throwing away expired but still intact items out of excessive caution. Food nearing its expiration date can also be frozen to prolong its shelf life, as the freezer acts like a magic pause button, allowing it to retain flavor and last much longer than usual.

In fact, the annual emissions from spoiled food in the US are roughly equivalent to the emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global food loss and waste account for 8-10% of total greenhouse gas pollution. Emily Broad Leib, a professor at Harvard Law School, believes that producers and consumers must play a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions through smart consumption.

Those are not small numbers.

Jeffrey Costantino, a spokesperson for ReFED, stated that there are no real standards for food expiration dates. Consumer confusion leading to the habit of discarding expired food can harm the climate and household budgets. According to recent estimates by ReFED, approximately one-third of the U.S. food supply, or 80 million tons, is wasted. The group also found that wasted food could serve approximately 149 billion meals, use nearly a quarter of U.S. freshwater resources and 16% of U.S. arable land, and account for 6% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

According to estimates by Zach Conrad, assistant professor of food systems at William & Mary University, the average American wastes $1,300 worth of food each year.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), consumer confusion surrounding expiration dates may be responsible for about 20% of food wasted at home, resulting in an estimated $161 billion in losses annually. Meanwhile, according to the climate action organization Wrap, across the European Union (EU), 88 million tons of food are thrown away each year because they are thought to be past their expiration date.

In the UK, Waitrose has become one of the first supermarkets to remove the “best before date…” label in an effort to address food waste. Marija Rompani, Director of Sustainability and Ethics at John Lewis Partnership, the company that owns Waitrose, said: “By removing the best before date from products, we want our customers to use their own judgment to decide whether a product is still edible, increasing the chances of using the product and avoiding waste.”

According to researchers, nobody likes throwing food away, and people need stronger support to ensure they can cut down on food waste. Currently, there are readily available online tools to help people check food safety, such as FoodKeeper, an app developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which allows users to check the shelf life of food.

Dana Gunders' zero-waste kitchen handbook, from a pioneer in food waste management in the U.S., offers detailed, practical advice, such as scraping a few centimeters below blue-green mold on hard cheese to safely recover the rest. Researchers recommend eating food within 3-5 days and reheating it thoroughly to above 75 ^° C.

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